Last year, as the China Virus was just beginning to spread across the US, I suggested in these pages that it might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s China’s top lab for researching and engineering dangerous pathogens, especially coronaviruses.
No sooner did the story appear than it began to be attacked from all sides.
China issued heated denials, claiming the virus had jumped from bats to humans at the city’s seafood market. The lab a few miles down the road, Beijing officials huffed, had nothing — zip, zilch, nada — to do with it.
I was not surprised that Beijing tried to shuffle off its responsibility for the pandemic onto our little furry flying friends. I mean, the alternative was potentially being held liable for millions of deaths and countless trillions of dollars in damage to the world’s economy.
But I was taken aback when The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, published a letter signed by “27 prominent public health scientists” that dismissed my lab origin thesis as a “conspiracy theory.”
They reported that scientists from multiple countries “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife” and “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Then Facebook piled on, suppressing my opinion piece for weeks on end last year.
Today, in the aftermath of Big Tech’s takedown of President Trump’s social media accounts, no one would be surprised by such blatant censorship. But at the time I was shocked that the social media “fact-checkers” decided that mine was not a valid opinion.
Later, it was revealed that one of the original “fact-checkers” Facebook had used was herself participating in a joint research project with virologists at the Wuhan lab. Can anyone spell “conflict of interest”?
Now it turns out that she wasn’t the only one with a research connection to the lab.
US Right to Know, an investigative public health nonprofit group, decided to look into the matter further. Through a public records request, they were able to obtain emails that show The Lancet statement was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has close ties with the Wuhan lab.
How close? So close that EcoHealth Alliance has received millions of dollars of US taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is the same kind of research that I have long suspected escaped to cause COVID-19.
The drafter of The Lancet statement was none other than the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak. Which means that the very statement that, for many months, shut down open debate on the possible laboratory origin of the China Virus, was actually the product of an organization that was collaborating with the Wuhan lab in the genetic engineering of coronaviruses.
Daszak evidently did not want this connection to become widely known. He stressed in emails that the “statement will not have EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person,” so that it will be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists.” It was in fact signed not only by Daszak, but by four of his EcoHealth colleagues as well. (The entire tranche of emails is archived here: EcoHealth Alliance emails: University of Maryland.)
The Daszak statement closes with the sentence: “We declare no competing interests.”
I find this strange, for I can think of a number of “competing interests” in play here. Chief among these would be a desire to deflect attention away from the close ties between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab, where they were carrying out the kind of “Gain of Function” research on coronaviruses that may well have given rise to COVID-19.
Now that even New York magazine — no bastion of conservative thought — is belatedly exploring the theory that the virus leaked from the lab, are the rest of us now free to at least debate that question? I mean, without being dismissed as conspiracy theorists?
EcoHealth Alliance declined to comment.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s ‘Dream’ is the New Threat to World Order.”